ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY.
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unmanned systems
inside
June/July 2017
intelligence that go well beyond what a single
computer can do. But because they're simple,
they'll have limited computing capabilities as
individuals. There will be no algorithms to
enable them to make split second decisions
when they need to avoid an obstacle or have
other problems they need to solve. That's why
communication becomes important when per-
forming inspection missions or other activities
that might involve obstacles or changes to the
f light plan.
When these drones are f lying 50 miles off
shore by themselves—to complete an oil rig
inspection, for example—they won't be on a
high bandwidth connection or have the abil-
ity to access a Wi-Fi network, Chowdhury
said. They'll only send a few kilobytes of data
to each other at a time—so that data must be
compact and relevant.
A team at MIT
developed a
decentralized control
algorithm for drone
swarms last year.
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"They need to be able to share small bits of
optimized information to communicate. They
can't send images or video," he said. "They're
on an ad-hoc network built amongst them-
selves and they're f lying several hundred me-
ters away from each other. We have to make
sure they're communicating small bits of